Jurgis

Possibly illegally. And possibly gonna lose your money after execution. ;D

Units? Which ones? Asking because I have a watchlist of about 100 of the 300 looking for a deal and exactly 1 is below $10.10. It started trading today. TLGAU, ITHXU, HCAQ. OSTRU is/was close.

Impressions on the teas in my latest order: - Jasmine Black Pearls - I liked it a lot. Very expensive though. I got it for free for points. - Orange Pekoe - blah. Nothing special. Generic black tea. Won't buy more. - Gaba Guava - OK, but nothing special. Won't buy more. - Buddha's Blend - pretty good though expensive.

FYI, some noname SPAC units are now down below $10.10 or so. This is deflating fast at least on the noname end. Do your DD, call Robinhood to tell them "no SPACs for men in tights!".

GME $1000 Jan calls. It's a conservative value investment. Mike Burry told me so. J/K

Again, I’m not for the restrictions per se, at least not the way they’ve been done. What I’m trying to understand is why bringing MORE speculative retail money going long GME or anything else up 5,10,100x in the past week would be a good thing, or somehow in favor of the little guy. It will all be lost when this goes away. Maybe I’m missing something here. I am not saying to bring more speculative retail money. But let's take NOK or BB now or TSLA last year. Let's say there was a price runup and brokers stop retail investors from buying more while institutions are allowed to trade. Let's say NOK or BB or TSLA last year then delivers a big deal or blockbuster quarter and stock goes up 2x, 5x or whatever. Brokers just screwed anyone who wanted to invest long and hodl for great business results. So we may be close to being on same page. But there is quite an issue of preventing market participants from buying stocks in companies with legit businesses and possibly not even overvalued just because their price went up 2x or whatever. Without taking options into account, I'd say halt the stock for 3-5 days. Although that does not resolve the issue where this might cost the potential buyers, but at least that would treat everyone equally. Edit: another example. Let's look at BYDDF. Last year stock went from $5 to $15 - 3x. Is it OK for brokers to stop people from buying it at this price irrespective whether it was mentioned on WSB or not? Well, the stock then went from $15 to $30. So stopping people from buying it "speculatively" would have prevented them from getting another 2x of gains. I'd say this would not have been a good solution. What's the difference from NOK right now? What if NOK business does well and its stock goes to $15 or $20 this year? How preventing people from buying at $7 is a good idea? (Well, yes, NOK business could be crappy and stock may languish at $4. BYDDF stock could have crashed from $15 to $5. ::) )

That's not true. Because there is no way for little guys to buy, it is quite likely that institutions can exploit the one sided market today since they are not prohibited to pile on the puts/short side. The equal to all solution would have been to apply the same restrictions to all market participants. This is true but, just sepculating, I don't think this is the brokers colluding with hedge funds (except maybe Robin Hood but I don't know obviously). The far more likely story is brokers are trying to limit legal exposure given that it's obvious some people will lose money on GME and those people may have grounds to sue. So applying equal restrictions to all market participants is not a trivial task because you have to figure out how to deal with fiduciary like stuff I think, which doesn't apply in the same way to accredited investors. Sure, I agree with what you wrote.

TSLA is not on the list of stonks that Robinhood prevents from buying. Cause clearly it's not at 100x intrinsic value unlike the stonks on Robinhood list. So, let's all pile into TSLA. ?????

That's not true. Because there is no way for little guys to buy, it is quite likely that institutions can exploit the one sided market today since they are not prohibited to pile on the puts/short side. The equal to all solution would have been to apply the same restrictions to all market participants.

100x intrinsic value? NOK is trading at 100x intrinsic value according to who? Robinhood? So it's OK for retail investors on RobinHood to buy a long list of possibly worthless stonks that were not mentioned on WSB or mentioned on some other crappy forum. But let's prevent them from buying NOK which is real company with real business and possibly undervalued just because it was mentioned by WSB. ::) I'm somewhat OK with banning option trades although this also should be codified in actual rules rather than enacted ad hoc with a benefit to large institutions. Are GME options not buyable/sellable today for institutions with access to big broker trading desks?

And today Motley Fool Rule Breakers say "Buy Moderna". +5% (Most of their buy recs go up 5-10% on the day of the rec). Maybe we should tell RobinHood to disallow buying Moderna too. ::)

Sorry but that simply isn't a rational argument unless you consider brokerage platforms as financial advisors. People are ok with ARK pumping companies with terrible fundamentals the past four years and allowing retail investors to buy in. But all of a sudden it's about protecting free individuals from making conscious decisions with their own money. You're picking winners and losers if you intervene. I mean the head of NASDAQ said that trading should be halted so firms can reposition accordingly. That is absurd as it gets and she should immediately be removed for suggesting something like that. Brokers don’t have a fiduciary responsibility but do have a suitability responsibility but is weaker but still opens them up to lawsuits. Why do you think it is you have to answer a set of questions on experience in the stock market before trading on margin, penny stocks, international stocks, and options? What the head of Nasdaq said is elitist, but I think brokers are just trying to cover their asses. Closing down GME trades seems to me like an admission their vetting procedures are insufficient. I'm frustrated, because I think there are some very nice options trades available here because of the extremely elevated IV. The market is getting disorderly, so I suspect the market makers are backing off. That's a great environment to be picking up easy gains, imo, but IB won't let me. So basically: - stupid retail investors are screwed - sophisticated retail investors are screwed - market makers are happy - institutions are happy Par for the course.

No $41t Sherlock. Would have never guessed stock prices would drop when people are not allowed to buy them. ::)

I really hope that people who have GME positions open today will sue brokers and possibly market makers for market manipulation. They likely won't win or win pennies-worth settlement though.

First of all, Gregmal is likely not banned. Second of all, where were you all guys when great contributors like Schwab711 were forced to leave CoBF because of behavior of people like Gregmal who has justified rape multiple times on this site without any consequences. These are great posts showing the attitude of people on CoBF: screw good contributors, but let's allow complete assholes post on the site and poison it to others. Shows pretty clearly where CoBF is headed. Gregmal should have been banned long time ago. He's probably still not.

While I agree, I think they had no other choice. There are only 70 million shares in existence. Probably 50-60 million that are not in index funds or owned by the new CEO. Half of which is probably in large positions, so you only need a million people trying to buy 100 shares or an option, and the system breaks down. With option expiration tomorrow GME could literally have gone to the moon. Big mistake that they added more strikes this week. Right now IB does not allow opening any positions on GME or its options, long or short, not even rolling the short leg of calendar spreads. I wonder if that's legal, certainly could f*k up a lot of option strategies. LOL free markets hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. And then people wonder why retail investors think that markets are fixed against them.

Amazing post. The most comical aspect of all of this WSB shit to me is that it's ending up bailing out deep value guys who rode most of this stuff down to the point where it was effectively stub value. And I say that as a deep value guy who unfortunately didn't own any of these fun exit trades. QFT. If only Sears had managed to last to Jan 2021... ;D

This. ;D 8)

+1 It's not just short-squeezes though, right? I mean that exacerbated this, but short squeeze lifted the shares from $140 to $300. It was redditors and Gamma that lifted it from $4 to $140. The idea that a board of 2+ million members can be mobilized/weaponized to lever the F up and distort the trading of ANY asset/market IS problematic - for businesses, for pensions, for markets in general. What if Pepsi makes a political donation reddit decides it doesn't like and they short its shares into oblivion taking down pensioners assets with it? Is that ok? What if these guys get into FX futures/future options and all simultaneously enter longs into the EUR/USD pairing and blow the EUR USD pair to 3-4 USD temporarily? You don't think that could be problematic for businesses all over the world? What if they decide that they all think the Fed is exploding the dollar and decide to drive oil into the stratosphere by all loading into the front-month contract (the exact opposite of negative prices in April)? These things matter. Yes - those are all bigger markets. But it's a growing community now (1+ million recent member adds). More on the way. And HFT/trend follower/momo strategies that will ride their coattails. This is a HUGE pile of liquidity that can really slosh anywhere it wants that that is NOT healthy. I wonder how you propose to regulate this. Forget concerted shorting. How do you propose to regulate people going long because they read something somewhere? Are you proposing to ban social networks? Are you proposing to ban/moderate posts about stocks? Based on what metrics? If Jim Cramer or Chamath or Elon posts to use Signal and people buy unrelated stock to stratosphere how are you going to regulate that? Ban every post that mentions a stock that reaches more than 1M people? How? Just FYI, there is no cartel or monopoly here. There is no agreement that WSB bros will actually buy anything. There is no central authority that makes people buy GME. There is no single person who "did it". And even if there was - as is the case with Chamath or Elon - what exactly is their crime in saying "buy GME"? You might be able to persuade regulators to ban options (not a big loss IMO), although I'm sure there's gonna be yuge pushback on this. Or maybe change some rules to make gamma squeeze unlikely. But I don't see how you expect to prevent millions of people from deciding that they want to buy some crappy stonk at the same time. @Sanjeev: if this crosses no-politics line, please delete and let me know.

That is also true. 8)

IMO there is a potential of large market drop when the rocket-hodl-WSB junk stonks break down. There is a potential that if marginal buyers are all in junk stonks and if these stonks break, there may be no buyers left for the index or general stocks. The buy-the-dip would be replaced by wall-street-f'ckd-us-again-market-is-rigged-sell-sell-sell-and-nvr-come-back. Just one possible scenario. Not saying it has to happen this way.

+1

Bitcoin dropping because all bitcoin bros are piling into GME. ::)

To paraphrase Sanjeev's sig: No company is bankrupt that has WSBs!

Why would environmentalists cringe at this?